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Hi all,
I just received a literary publication by email from Saigon.
Intellectuals there have been using photocopy and now the internet for
some time to express themselves. What catches my eye about this
publication is that it is issued by a publishing house: Nhat xuat ban
Gia^~y Vu.n.
Literary and general publishing in Viet Nam has been deadly dull for a
long time. In some ways it has got worse since doi moi. Part of the
reforms were to reduce the subsidy to editorial staff. While the
business staff were freed to entrepreneurial ventures, that income has
stayed on the business side of the house. So there is no link between
editorial vision and return.
Where during the war we had such intellectuals as Nguyen Khac Vien and
Huu Ngoc dodging bombs to run the Foreign Languages Publishing House to
clear national purpose, and then after the war serving the people with
an abundance of publications, now we have editorial staff reduced to
selling their franchise, the government monopoly on the press reserved
to the publishing house directors, to whoever has cash.
Worse, the only income they expect or plan to get from selling a
publishing license is the bribe itself. I was dismayed on a tour of
publishing house in Ha Noi in 1994 to see basement after basement of
books placed in this manner by foreign NGOs that clearly weren't going
anywhere.
It is a depressing situation, one you don't have to speak Vietnamese to
pick up on. When I was showing the former Minister of Education of the
Youth International Party around Ha Noi in 1995, I could barely get him
out of bed after the first day. The miasma of fear and mediocrity tied
to intellectual life in Viet Nam, conveyed by the situation of
publishers, is stupefying, commented on eloquently in essays by insiders
like Nguyen Huy Thiep.
So the email I got yesterday is something new, to me anyways, some
people sitting in Saigon not just passing essays around in photocopy or
posting poems on the Internet but actually calling themselves a
publishing house. It's a testment to the improvisation and forward
thinking exemplified by such as Vien and Ngoc in the old days within the
Party, and amply documented throughout the rest of civil life by
Kierklievet and DiGregorio.
Now will someone tell me what Gia^`y Vu.n means?
Dan
Dan,
When we talk Giay Vun, we talk my language!. Giay Vun is waste paper,
literally, the bits of waste paper that are scattered along the streets.
At least, that how the junk buyers refer to it.
Mike
What a fabulous name for a publishing house, especially in Saigon!
Joe Hannah
This Gia^'y Vu.n publishing house sounds a bit unusual for me. As far as I
know, there's no private publishing house in Vietnam until now. There're in
total 42 publishing houses in the whole country. I don't know where this Giay
Vun house comes from, but if it exists, it has to belong to some "umbrella"
state organization. And I'm even not sure if such a provocative (though very
interesting) name can be approved.
CamLy
Then again, there are definitely now some fully private movie
production companies in Vietnam, which would probably have to pass a
higher set of start up standards than publishing companies. The
Enterprise Law required that specific legislation would need to be
introduced to block start ups in particular sub-industries.
markus
I think the name itself says that it's a samidatz type of publication. I am
not aware of any publishing house sending out their products overseas via
mailing lists, esp. if it's a journal type.
Literary journals in Vietnam have enough problems finding an audience.
Marketing via mailing lists is perhaps furthest from the editors' mind.
Nguyen Ba Chung
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